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Originally Posted by Raynor
I disagree; Numenor was not free from corruption, in Arda only Aman was (at best). Numenoreans were still Men, although elevated. All Men had a corrupted idea of death - on behalf of Melkor. Cf. the words of Pengolod to AElfwine:
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I can't see how Men could ever have had an 'uncorrupted' idea of death. Death would always have entailed loss, grief & pain. It would always have seemed terrible. What Melkor told them simply confirmed what they felt anyway. Unless, of course, we are to believe that Aragorn's death was the way all humans should have died.
The trouble with that is that to our experience it is unreal. We don't die like that - or its the exception that proves the rule. In the documentary Tolkien in Oxford, broadcast by the BBC in 1967 Tolkien is shown reading the following passage from Simone de Beauvoir:
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There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
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& calling that 'the keyspring to LotR'. That sense that death is an 'unjustifiable violation' is the heart of LotR & the heart of our own feeling about death. We may speculate about living in a world where death is absent, or one in which death is accepted as a matter of fact, & hardly registers & we just happily 'move on' when our time comes , but it is not our experience, & if we lived in such a world we would not be who we are, & whatever we created (assuming we created anything) would be different - as alien to us as the idea that death is nothing special.
EDIT. The problem with the idea that what is wrong is not death per se but rather our attitude to it, is that it turns the tragedy of a death like Beren's or Boromir's, or Turin & Nienor's, into a misperception - if only those close to them & we the readers could see death for what 'it really is' we wouldn't feel any more grief over what happened to them than if they had avoided being killed & gone off on holiday, or moved to another country. Death is an unjustifiable violation, it is cruel & wrong - & not just because Melkor said so.